Computers

Interesting article

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Bjarne Stroustrup on Educating Software Developers

A very good read; it also reminds me why most of the pe

One thing that especially stuck a cord with me:

Education should prepare people to face new challenges; that’s what makes education different from training. In computing, that means knowing your basic algorithms, data structures, system issues, etc., and the languages needed to apply that knowledge. It also means having the high-level skills to analyze a system and to experiment with alternative solutions to problems. Going beyond the simple library-user level of programming is especially important when we consider the need to build new industries, rather than just improving older ones.

For the love of Pete’s sister, the education system in America hasn’t been preparing the vast majority of people for jack shit, for at least the last 40 years, if not the last 120 years…. and with the way things are these days, I wonder how long until someone will write a song for Coneheads II, where s/high school/college/gi is applied ^_^.

I still meet people that struggle with literacy and logic, let along engineering. When it comes to CS majors that I’ve met, I usually see two major varieties: those that went through a decent course, and actually paid attention. And those that probably got the turn your head and cough treatment, or spent more time playing Counter Strike.

:-/

Tech Support?

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http://www.cracked.com/article_17271_why-tech-support-sucks-look-behind-scenes.html

That’s why I only call Tech Support(tm) for HCFs, and not the stupid PEBKACs so many lusers call in, and screw things up for the rest of the world >>.

And this has got to be the best pic of a tech-support call result that I have ever laughed at xD

14 months from purchase to setup?

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Not so long ago a thread came up on DF, dealing with printing. That reminded me…. I baught my printer in what, February of 2007 and it’s just been gathering dust?

That’s gotta be a new record: for either laziness or being to fsckin’ busy lol.

The reason I bought it, I knew this model was usable with most OSes. Honestly, I _hate_ ink jet printers (and printers in general, but yeah… especially ink jets). Sadly, a decent PostScript printer is harder to find in this place then an affordable laser printer; having to use an inkjet makes me very happy that I rarely print anything.

Around OpenBSD 4.3 or so, I stripped off all printing related packages off my server: the shitmark hasn’t worked in years. So I had to setup the format filtering magic anew: ghostscript (no_x11 flavour), hpijs, foomatic-filters, and foomatic-db-hpijs. Several years ago it was my intention to run a networked printer off the box, but the printer I had at the time more or less stopped functioning under FreeBSD+CUPS, so I haven’t paid much attention since then. Most distributions use the Common Unix Print System (CUPS) these days; but I’m just old at heart, I like the Berkeley Line Printer Daemon (lpd). CUPS, only way I ever know wth is going on is going cross eyed with log files; with lpd, at least you know it’s brainlessly simple to sort out.

My only complaint about the printer, ‘lptest | lpr’ resulted in 2 pages of ~60 lines before I decided to dequeue the 200 line job: and the some-bitch isn’t smart enough to eject the darn 3rd sheet of paper ^_^. (whether this has to do with my PPD file or hpijs support for my printer is not interesting to me, lol). On top of that, the thing prints about as slow as I can write text by hand. I could just imagine if I fed tpsh’s ~3000 lines of text though it, probably take a week and 50 sheets of paper.

Worthless router

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Ended up woken up around 0930 (yippee, 3 hours sleep) due to a power outage; then dragged out shopping 🙁

When I got home and finally on the computer, I noticed for the first time in a LONG time my laptop couldn’t get a wireless connection: usually my BSD system is queen of the WLAN. A quick bit of investigation showed that during the power outage, the router reset itself totally. It’s a good thing my laptops Ethernet port has been supported since ~FreeBSD 6.4. Dug up an old Ethernet cable and plugged into the router. Sure enough the piece of crap got reset to factory defaults during the power outage stuff this morning.

Reconfigured the router and upgraded the encryption: only to find out my mothers PC couldn’t handle it, despite having the same hardware as my desktop. A quick search of Google turned up what I suspected, menu option added in an update; and her box was running XP Home SP2 / IE6 / .NET 1.1 lol. Updates are almost finished, and now every machines back on the network

My mothers been badgering me to try charters atypical power cycle suggestion: which I know could be done for years and years and wouldn’t change jack shit; she’s got no logical concept of networks. Some how, I think understanding helps troubleshoot stuff then trying the Microsoft Ritual Solution (MSRS). In my experience it works fine for Win32, but UNIX and networking equipment in general seems to follow a more sane pattern 😉

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine; The Jargon File, version 4.4.7

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

I always think about that old koan when having such trouble lol.

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Awhile back I stumbled over a macro program for Win32, but lost track of it; found it again today: http://www.autohotkey.com/

I’ve been missing such abilities under Win32, and ain’t about to swap my old PS/2 keyboard for one of them fancy G15s lol.

Flitations with /bin/ed

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lately, I’ve been developing a strange affection for the old ed(1) text editor. Because tpsh defaults the value of EDITOR to ed on unix, and edit on windows; I’ve had to deal with ed quite a lot whilst working on my shells ‘fc’ built-in (fc is the command for listing and editing/re-executing commands through the shells history).

Of course once support for ENV was worked out, I changed it to ex >_>

atm I’m reading the ed tutorial in ed, via ssh to my OpenBSD machine; it actually makes a nice pager :-/. All in all, I don’t think I would take ed over vi for coding but it’s a rather interesting program; after starting vim it’s also possible to drop into extended ex mode with gQ, effectively giving a modernized line editor.

My interest in ed atm is for short editing tasks, the kind where vi and other screen editors are not often necessary for the task. Some times, I can’t help but wonder if I’m secretly older then my birth date suggests lol.

mmm.

lol@someproject

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I don’t know what is more funny, reporting potential security errors to a project or looking at the even worse ‘solutions’ they cook up.